As my active players have grown into the hundreds rule breakers and exploiters are becoming more common. Our mods aren’t always online to deal with them so at the request of my community I added a votekick system so players can get rid of those causing trouble on their own.
The current system can server ban anyone who is voted to be kicked, but to avoid abuse only trusted players on a private whitelist (about 20 people) can use votekick. Votes can be started by using a GUI where you select the player and put in your custom reason to kick them. There’s a 1 minute cooldown before someone can start another votekick. All kicks are logged and I am able to see who kicked who, when, and for what reason.
My main concern is not enough players have access for it to be effective, but at the same time if I open it to everyone someone could easily abuse by vote-kicking everyone with seemingly legitimate reasons and kill off servers.
My game is an open-world combat sandbox, so there is no leveling system or other method of progress I could use to control access other than play time and badges earned, both of which I believe would only delay the initial problem of abuse. My game also has 100 player servers which are always almost full and someone getting vote-kicked AKA server banned from one would be a very big deal. It’s important I get this right.
What should I do? Keep the current system how it is? Change how the system works? Accept the fact that there will be abuse at some point which could potentially kill servers? I do want a votekick system but I feel anything I try will end up hurting the player base in the end, so should I even have votekick in the first place?
Have you tried to make anticheats, securing your remotes? If no, you can use sanity checks for remotes, you can try making an anti-cheat for common exploits.
We do have a basic anti-cheat. Our main problem is people using inappropriate decals (nazi, adult content, etc.) with our custom flags in game which we can’t directly moderate. Only thing we can do is report abuse, add the decal ID to a blacklist, then call it a day, and until a mod gets around to doing that we’re using votekick as an immediate solution for players.
This shouldn’t be an issue as Decals are moderated before they’re able to be published anyway. I would focus on fly hacks, aimbot etc rather than Decals as that isn’t your fault if it gets past moderation.
Yes, with our system they replicate. So basically, we have custom flags in our game which you can put your own decals on to show off your custom factions.
We hardly get any reports for actual exploits (thanks to our anti-cheat). Inappropriate decals account for the majority of our reports, including images of suggestive symbols and explicit content. While it isn’t our fault they got approved by roblox moderation in the first place we still need to take it out of our game.
That is very strange that Roblox hasn’t been moderating them, unless of course they manage to find a way to bypass moderation and input the image directly into the game rather than via a decal, which has been seen many times before.
There isn’t really much you can do other than have a report system. There would be no way to automatically detect an inappropriate image without using AI or a database of these images.
Perhaps you could also add a thing where if a users decal is reported, then it can be hidden to all users until a moderator checks it out.
There’s all sorts of methods out there for bypassing roblox image moderation, we’ve confirmed this is the case as all of the IDs we’ve blacklisted were live on the website at the time.
This is an interesting idea, but like votekick leads to a similar problem of who should have access to report user decals. Someone could just mass report everybody and make everyone’s custom flags disappear and add an unnecessary pileup for our mods to take care of.
I personally think this is still the best method regardless of that risk, however to add some extra precautions to prevent backup, you could say that there must be multiple reports in a certain timespan from different factions/groups (or whatever your game’s system is) in order for it to be hidden.
Unless they’re dedicated enough to make ALT’s or get a friend to report random factions as well (which I doubt), this will work pretty flawlessly.
Report functions should really allow everyone (other than the group being reported) to vote for votekick. Scale the amount of votes needed depending on server size, and I doubt it’ll be used other than for its intended purpose.